Related articles

Stunning dresses on show will include Holly Golightly's black Givenchy dress from
Breakfast at Tiffany's
, Scarlett O'Hara's velvet 'curtain' dress from
Gone With the Wind
and the stunning green gown worn by Keira Knightley as Cecilia Tallis in
Atonement
.

But there will also be plenty of costumes that are far from glamorous but instantly recognisable: Travis Bickle's military jacket and plaid shirt from
Taxi Driver
, Indiana Jones's leather jacket and fedora, the Barbour jacket and sensible tweed skirt worn by Dame Helen Mirren in
The Queen
.

The exhibition has been five years in the making. It is curated by Deborah Nadoolman Landis, the Hollywood costume designer who counts
Raiders of the Lost Ark
among her many credits.

Her guiding principle was to start with the characters.

"My starting point was thinking not so much about the costumes but about the characters that have become embedded in popular culture.

"Whose faces do we see on postcards? What characters mean the most to people? Which are the characters that show up time and time again at fancy dress parties?" she said.

"I went to my husband [film director John Landis] and friends and colleagues and asked, 'Who do you love? If you went to the V&A, who would you want to see?'

"It's a generational thing. For some, it was Joan Crawford's waitress outfit from
Mildred Pierce
. All the girls in the V&A's conservation department immediately named the dress from
Atonement
.

"I didn't go looking for costumes, I went looking for characters. This is not a decorative show. There's plenty of glamour - Marilyn Monroe's dress from
Some Like It Hot
is jaw-dropping in its nakedness.

"But it's not about the fabulosity, it's about what's inside."

The costumes will be displayed alongside film clips, montages and interviews with the designers, directors and actors involved.

Harrison Ford's outfit from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
began with a Steven Spielberg sketch. Nadoolman Landis recalled: "Steven drew a picture. It's the most charming thing you ever saw - it looks like a 12-year-old did it.

"It said, 'he's 6'1" and wears a hat'. And this picture showed me exactly what Indiana Jones would look like.

"Everyone knows that Tom Selleck was originally cast. Tom is 6'6" and gorgeous, and we were terribly disappointed when it turned out he couldn't do it.

"We got Harrison Ford at the last minute. Harrison is such a reticent superstar, he's an intellectual, he's thoughtful, he's introspective. He brings so much of that to Indiana Jones. The character is supposed to be this professorial archaeologist and you believe that from Harrison, whereas I think that would have been a tough sell from Tom Selleck."

The story of how Judy Garland's gingham pinafore from
The Wizard of Oz
came to be in the exhibition reads like a film script.

In 2005, the dress came up for auction at Bonhams. Among the bidders in the saleroom was a woman who had loved
The Wizard of Oz
since childhood and had dreamed of owning the dress.

She lost out to an anonymous telephone bidder - who turned out to be her husband, a British businessman who shelled out £140,000 for it. He gave it to her as a present for her 32nd birthday. Their identities have never been disclosed.

When the V&A began working on the exhibition, Nadoolman Landis got a call.

She said: "The caller said, 'My employer has heard that there's going to be a landmark exhibition and she has one of the classic Hollywood costumes, would you be interested?'

Dorothy Gale in the film 'Wizard of Oz'. Photo: Jane Mingay

"Of course we said yes. And then we got another message, that we had to be available two weeks on Tuesday and meet outside Temple Tube station. We turned up and there were two other characters waiting there, private conservators who had also been told to meet there, and they didn't know who the owner was either.

"I thought, 'This must be how MI5 operate'. Then we met this person, the assistant, who asked to see all of our passports for security reasons and then said, 'Follow me'."

They followed the assistant to a private bank on the Strand, where they had to show their passports again.

Nadoolman Landis said: "It was like Gringotts in Harry Potter. We go down and down and down, then through a big door into a safe. It was like going into a submarine.

"They brought this box in on their shoulders. I put on white gloves, cut the string and opened the box, and there was Dorothy's dress."

The pinafore was designed by Adrian, the legendary Hollywood costume designer, and made from cheap gingham. It was run up on a treadle sewing machine to ensure it looked authentically like a garment that had been made by Dorothy's Aunty Em.

The dress is tiny - Judy Garland was 17 at the time and under five feet in height. Her name is sewn on to a label on the inside hem.

"This dress was made in 1939 at the greatest moment of MGM Hollywood history," Nadoolman Landis said. "The woman representing the owner asked if there was something wrong with it because I looked so upset. Because I hope this doesn't sound absurd, but I cried.